Africabeat

You really don’t have to watch much of this but please, just watch a little.  You’ll giggle.  I promise.

I was doing a search on Tudou for 哈佛, logic being that given the love many in Asia have for Harvard, some Tudou user must have at some point created an “I love Harvard” video.  (Yes, this is how I waste my time.)

Instead, buried among all the “Harvard English” MP3 files, I found a Korean television show, Chuyen tinh Harvard (Love Story in Harvard), about a young Korean man’s days as a Harvard law student.  Because he’s hot and his love interest, a Korean (or possibly Korean-American) Harvard medical student, is equally easy on the eyes, and because the whole thing is just so deliciously corny, I had no problem forgiving them their complete inability to speak English.

But what I want you to see is this part of an episode where the protagonist visits an old black woman to talk to her about a case he and some of his classmates are working on, pro bono.  Keep in mind their dialogue was written by a Korean screenwriter (and I imagine “polished” by one of the American actors).

Arrived in Beijing last night, jetlagged.  Woke up at about 3:30am.  Took this photo at 6:30, about an hour and a half after dawn.  (Read Ernest Hemingway while flying over Siberia, and strange things begin to happen to the number of clauses you’ll allow in a sentence.)

Beijing, morning, July 24, 2008

As the sun rises, the gray just gets brighter.  It may be out later, as
it was when I arrived around sunset yesterday, a round and a sort of
desaturated yellow-orange, but with no power to change the permanent gray of the sky.

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Last week, Dubai World, Dubai’s investment holding company, announced it will invest $230 million in Rwanda’s tourism industry. Dubai World plans to build a five-star tented park at the base of the country’s famed gorilla preserve at Volcanoes National Park, an airstrip and hotel at Akagera Park, and a tea estate adjacent to a proposed four-star hotel at Nyungwe forest. 

The Rwanda Investments and Export Promotion Agency (RIEPA) is aggressively courting ICT and tourism investments as part Vision 2020, an ambitious plan to transform Rwanda into a middle-income country by the year 2020. 

When I was in Kigali last summer, I spoke to some officers at RIEPA about Vision 2020, and they showed me these really beautiful sketches of luxury cabins, best described as castles of glass, perched over a lake.  I believe they had commissioned an American architecture firm to do the drawings.  "All we need is an investor," they said.  It was one of the many moments during my three weeks in Rwanda where I thought, "Damn, I can’t help but admire the sheer audacity of this government’s dreams."

Looks like audacity is paying off.

Here’s some info on the Dubai World investment in French and English.

See also: Notes on Rwanda, Democracy & Authoritarianism

I’ll stand up and shout when I think people are dead wrong or heading in a dangerous direction, but I’m generally the girl who sits back, listens and when she speaks tries to do so with conviction but hopes she won’t rock the boat too much.  The flurry of blog posts, digg, newsvine and reddit comments, del.cio.us bookmarks, and personal emails (both laudatory and critical) since the article on aid/Bono/TED was (finally) published a few days ago has taken me by complete surprise. 

I am really glad that so many people are debating these issues.  And if I’ve been able to spark interest and get people talking about TED, aid, entrepreneurship, and the media’s portrayal of Africa in a meaningful way, even if it meant being uncharacteristically polemic, then I am happy for it.

But a few clarifications:

1) Yes I’ve been to Africa and no I don’t think all African children carry AK-47s – A few lazy readers have suggested I go to Africa and see for myself  how wrong I am to take a few exceptional examples of African dysfunction to generalize for the entire continent. 

Putting aside the fact that I had to be in Africa in order to have attended a conference in Arusha, I’ve been to seven African countries and in none of them have I seen an AK-47-toting child, people dying of famine or war, or any of the other completely ludicrous stereotypes that form the opening paragraph of the article.

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This is kind of awesome…from Beijing Review via Danwei :

More than a century ago, in 1904, a 17-year-old young Chinese, leaving behind
his wife and new-born son, came to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to make a living, as
he had no chance of getting a share of his ancestral property, being the
youngest among the five boys of a peasant family in Nanpan Village near
Guangzhou. After 18 years, his illiterate village wife adventured into Africa
all by herself to join him, knowing there was no possibility of his return to
China. The brave woman overcame all obstacles of language and location in the
course of her long journey.

This is not a fictional story, but a true account
of what happened to the grandparents of Fay King Chung, the first woman Chinese
minister of Zimbabwe and the first Director of the UNESCO International
Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA). She worked in various
capacities in the Zimbabwean Ministry of Education in the 1980s, before finally
rising to the position of minister. (Read more)

I have personal reasons for finding this article interesting.  Fay’s grandfather – along with about half the married men of his generation – emigrated from their ancestral village of Nanpan, near Guangzhou, around the turn of the last century.  Fay’s grandfather went to Zimbabwe, but others made their new lives in South Africa, Cuba and Jamaica.

My great-grandfather and his brother left their village somewhere in Guangdong (for all I know, it was Nanpan) at around the same time, stopping over in London, and then making their way to Jamaica before settling in Haiti.  Or at least that is how the family lore goes.  I have two photographs of my great grandfather, know his last name was Feng, and that he owned a restaurant in Haiti and possibly a laundry, but was a pharmacist in his old life.  Did he also leave behind a wife Guangdong?  What had happened in his homeland that he was willing to leave everything he knew behind, lose his country, lose his language, lose even his blood, absorbed and mixed into the Great Caribbean Gene Pool?  If he were alive today, would he recognize himself in any of his descendents?

I wish I could go to his ancestral village, but our family lost knowledge along time ago, probably forever.

A Mail & Guardian article explores the role of Indian investment in Africa, reporting on Indian investments in African oil, infrastructure and light manufacturing.  Last week, 300 business delegates from 35 African countries visited New Delhi to explore potential opportunities. 

Well it may not be as big of a story (India is democratic and English-speaking.  China is everyone’s favorite whipping boy), India is clearly looking to expand its business presence in Africa.  (See also: Africa as China and India’s "New Economic Frontier")

Can Other Developing Countries Be a Model for Africa?

At the China-Africa Business Council meeting, Chinese participants talked about the ways in which they believed Africa could learn from their experiences.  Before Deng Xiaoping’s gaige kaifang ("reform and opening up"), China was at a similar economic level as many African countries.  China’s success over the more than twenty-five years since can offer important lessons for African economies, they argued.

Similarly, I noticed the following quote in the Mail & Guardian piece:

"We want to learn from India’s experience," said Amadou Dioffo, managing
director of Sonidep Petrol and Gas Company of Niger. "Like us, India also has a
colonial past. We want to know how and why it is doing so much better now."

Which brings up a series of old and familiar questions (or at least I encountered these questions in nearly every college political economy course or course on the politics of X developing country):

1. Can other developing countries’ successes offer lessons or models for Africa? 
2. Why did South Korea become so rich when in the early 1960s, it was at about the same level of economic development (or perhaps even a bit lower) as Ghana? 
3. Why are China and India successfully developing now? 
4. Is Asia fundamentally different than Africa and is Africa just doomed to always be last in line? 
5. What structural or historical reasons account for Asian success and African stagnation?

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Tipped off by an Al Jazeera article, I stumbled upon a recent World Bank report, titled "Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier."  The report paints rosy pictures of "South-South" international commerce and of African potential to produce and export to Chinese and Indian markets at very competitive prices not just raw materials, but "diversified, nontraditional exports such as processed commodities,
light manufactured products, household consumer goods, food, and
tourism."

In short, Africa could be for India and China what China and India have been for the U.S. and Western Europe (and vice versa).  South-South trade might one day be the engine that drives African development just as Chinese manufacturing exports and Indian service exports are driving economic booms in those two countries.

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